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A Fiery Peace In A Cold War A Fiery Peace In A Cold War (2009)

by Neil Sheehan(Favorite Author)

3.72 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1588369056 (ISBN13: 9781588369055)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Random House

review 1: First, the only reason I didn’t give this book 5 stars is its lack of maps; any book discussing the campaign in the Pacific demands this. That being said, I didn’t want to like this book as much as I did; I’m just not a big fan of the Space and Missile culture—in my opinion, checklists and engineers have their place, but given my experience with the aforementioned culture I didn’t expect to find many lessons on war leadership in a book about it. I credit the fact that I did to the fact that each of the men who conceived and built ICBMs did something else before 1945 (the book’s depiction of the professional soldiers who built the USAF from the foundations laid by American WWI pilots in the U.S. Army Signal Corps is interesting and essential to the narrative).... more General Schriever, for instance, learned quite a bit about motivating people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t as a lieutenant in charge of a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in the 1930s and later repairing shot-up aircraft in the Island Hopping campaigns of WWII; he also flew combat missions there. I liked the fact that Sheehan has made this history more than a simple Schriever bio, though; people are molded by the events around them—large and small—and the geopolitics surrounding the U.S. Army Air Corps and the men who grew it into USAF are covered beautifully in this book. The Soviets, for example, also had a Manhattan-Style project, and it makes for VERY interesting reading. Again, the author doesn’t shy away from making a segue into a concept like the evolution of air-to-air refueling, then conveying why he did so to evolve the macro-narrative. The one meeting between Schriever and Albert Einstein at Princeton and the first face-to-face between President Eisenhower and Khrushchev are covered in depth alongside the massive radar USAF built at Diyarbakir, Turkey to detect launches at the Soviet missile test range, and the famous rocket-launch fails depicted in “The Right Stuff”. I enjoyed the sales pitch Schriever made to President Eisenhower and the story of the U.S. Army grabbing 127 Nazi V-weapon engineers (to include Werner von Braun, whose history is NOT glossed over here) for its own program in 1945. Sheehan masterfully ties the sack shut with a simple so-what statement: “Although no one could have foreseen it when Bernard Schriever assembled his small band at the Schoolhouse in Inglewood in the summer of 1954, their greatest achievement and that of all those who were to labor with them was to help buy the time needed for the Soviet Union to collapse of its own internal contradictions.” No cheesy Lee Greenwood background music; no wargasm “bomb them back to the stone age” noise; just objective historical analysis. I think that this book is a fine companion-piece for Michael Dobbs’ fantastic “One Minute to Midnight” (which Sheehan cites when discussing the Cuban Missile Crisis) and Mike Worden’s “Rise of the Fighter Generals” (spoiler alert—if you liked the way Curtis LeMay was depicted in “13 Days” and “Dr. Strangelove”, this book will support the bias you bring to it). Recommend.
review 2: This is a much a biography as history. From my perspective, I did learn a great deal about the role and importance of the ICBM to America's overall deterrence posture during the Cold War. Schriever is certainly a major player in the USAF, and even sorting through the overall positive review of his actions in the view of the author, Schriever was certainly as big a player in the USAF as LeMay (who is also a major player in this book, but as much a villan as a power player (LeMay was an advocate of the bomber and only as the success of the ICBMs became apparent did he get on board with the program)). As we try to refocus our efforts on nuclear deterrence, it is important to review our history and see what lessons men of past dealt with and what we need to do for the future. less

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